Archive for the ‘Scarab’ tag

If Lance Reventlow’s life were a work of fiction, readers would find the details of his story too fantastic to believe. Born into a family of enormous wealth with ties to nobility, Reventlow would go on to success as a racing driver, race car constructor and entrepreneur. For all his achievements, Reventlow’s life was marked by a series of failed personal relationships, and it would end in tragedy at the bottom of a Colorado canyon. While most fans of motorsport know of the story behind the Scarab sports racer, the story behind its creator is even more fascinating.

Born to Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton and Danish Count von Haughwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow in February of 1936, Lance Reventlow never knew a normal family life. Raised in a London mansion known as Winfield House (now home to the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom), Reventlow was witness to his father’s violent outbursts as well as his mother’s increasing drug and alcohol dependency. In 1938, the couple divorced, which lead to a bitter custody battle over young Lance. Hutton ultimately triumphed, and perhaps realizing that she was hardly a mother-of-the-year candidate, soon packed her son off to a series of boarding schools.

Hutton’s next marriage, in 1942, was to actor Cary Grant, and though this union would last just three years, it had something of a stabilizing effect on Reventlow, who would remain close to Grant for the rest of his life. It was Hutton’s following marriage, to Russian Prince Igor Troubetzkoy in 1947, which would forever shape Lance Reventlow’s destiny by exposing him to the world of Grand Prix racing. Troubetzkoy would go on to fame as the first Grand Prix driver to compete in a Ferrari, and would later capture victory in the 1948 Targa Florio. The glamor and excitement of professional motor racing stuck with Reventlow, and by his late teens he was already competing in club racing events near his Hollywood, California, home. Among his circle of friends was actor and fellow racer James Dean, and Reventlow was said to be among the last to speak with Dean before his tragic death in 1955.

Lance Reventlow drives the Scarab F1 car at Riverside, 1960.

Perhaps seeking more prestige or merely more speed, Reventlow abandoned the California sunshine for a season racing a rented Cooper Formula 2 car in Britain. Though he wasn’t successful enough to draw the attention of Formula One teams, the experience inspired Reventlow to return to the United States and begin producing a sports racer of his own, picking up where Briggs Cunningham had left off. Reventlow Automobile Incorporated soon occupied a small industrial space in Venice, California, where with the help of chief engineer Phil Remington and designers/builders Tom Barnes and Dick Troutman, the company produced a (very) limited number of sports racers that Reventlow called Scarabs.

The first Scarab, dubbed the Mk I, made its competition debut in early 1958, and by mid-season Reventlow was already racking up wins. The Scarab Mk II, driven by hired gun Chuck Daigh, followed later in the season and posted a win in just its second outing. Over the following year, the drivers recording race wins behind the Scarab Mk II’s wheel reads like a “who’s who” of late 1950s and early 1960s sports car racing, including names like Augie Pabst, Carroll Shelby, Jim Jeffords and Harry Heuer.

Perhaps satisfied with his success as a sports car constructor, Reventlow turned his attention towards creating America’s first Formula One car with the help of engine designer Leo Goossen. The Offenhauser-inspired four-cylinder proved too fragile and complex for the team to manage, particularly with limited pre-season testing, and during Reventlow Automobile’s 1960 effort, the squad’s lone finish was a 10th place at the United States Grand Prix, delivered by Daigh. Mechanical troubles aside, the Scarab F1 effort utilized a front-engine design at a time when the racing world was witnessing the dominance of rear-engine cars; it was, essentially, obsolete before its first competitive outing.

The Reventlow Automobiles team lacked direction for the 1961 season, with Daigh racing the third car originally built for the team’s F1 effort in lesser European series instead of Formula One. Daigh posted a pair of top 10 finishes in the Scarab before destroying it in a racing crash in England, where the car was essentially abandoned. For 1962, the team prepared a Buick-powered rear-engine Formula car, but FIA rule changes made the car illegal in European competition. It was raced once in Australia (where Daigh finished fourth, after battling with Sterling Moss for much of the race), but by then Reventlow had had enough of his efforts to field a successful racing team. A final car, the eighth Scarab constructed, was converted to street use by Reventlow (and even licensed in California), but later sold to John Mecom. Under Mecom’s ownership, the Scarab Mk IV would go on to great racing success with drivers A.J. Foyt, Augie Pabst and Walt Hansgen.

Shuttering his operation for the same tax-inspired reason that closed Cunningham’s doors, Reventlow leased the building to Carroll Shelby, who also hired Phil Remington to help build Cobras. Reventlow’s focus on constructing a winning Formula One car had not only burned through a noticeable portion of his wealth, it had cost him his marriage to actress Jill St. John. By the end of 1962, Reventlow’s passion for the sport of racing had dimmed as well, and he turned his attention to other interests such as flying, sailing, skiing and polo.

Two years later, in 1964, the 28-year old Reventlow married 19-year old Cheryl Holdridge, a former Mouseketeer and child actress. Though Holdridge never requested it, the union saw Reventlow hang up his driving gloves for good, and for a while the couple appeared to share a semi-normal married life, largely out of the media’s spotlight. As the 1960s came to an end, however, Lance and Cheryl were spending an increasing amount of time apart, with Reventlow spending the bulk of his time in Aspen, Colorado, while Holdridge remained at the couple’s house in California. In 1972, while scouting real estate in a canyon outside of Aspen, the plane that Reventlow was flying in as a passenger crashed while cutting a tight turn at low altitude, killing all aboard.

Though Reventlow enjoyed success as a driver, he lacked the focus necessary to become one of the sport’s true greats. The same can be said of his efforts building the Scarab sports racer, which was ultimately hampered by its low production volume. “Some people are born with brown eyes; I was born with money,” Reventlow once quipped to an interviewer. Perhaps it was that abundance of resource that ultimately proved to be Reventlow’s undoing.

1971 Porsche 917K at The Revs Institute. All photos courtesy The Revs Institute.

In 1994, the Collier Automotive Museum, one of the world’s premier automobile museums, closed its doors to the general public, but re-invented itself as The Revs Institute. Dedicated to the scientific study of the automobile and motorsports and their role in modern society, the facility remained closed to the public, with a few rare exceptions. Last month, however, The Revs Institute announced that it would open its doors to scheduled public visits, marking the first time in two decades that those outside academia or the media have access to the museum, and institute officials have set tomorrow, March 25, as the re-opening date.

In confirming tomorrow’s public re-opening, The Revs Institute also passed along photos of a few cars in the collection that were too good not to share. For those wondering what The Revs Institute has in its collection, the following images (with descriptions provided by the museum itself) paint a broad overview of what visitors can expect.

1913 Peugeot 3.0-liter Coupe de l’Auto: The car that changed the thinking that winning races was simply a matter of building bigger and bigger engines. In 1912, engineer Ernest Henry along with 3 of the best race drivers of this period convinced Peugeot of Henry’s design for a revolutionary 4-cylinder engine with twin camshafts and four valves per cylinder. Soon afterward, Peugeot were defeating their competitors who had twice the engine size. With engine refinements made for 1913, again, the French marque was victorious. The event was the Indianapolis 500; the driver was Arthur Duray; the car, the one you will find in the Revs Gallery finished 2nd that year.

1914 Mercedes Grand Prix Car: One of six team cars, and one of only three surviving cars, that gave Mercedes the first one-two-three sweep in the French Grand Prix history – marking one of the most exciting moments in motorsports, and at a critical juncture in world affairs, April of 1914 – just two weeks before the outbreak of WWI. The innovative 4-cylinder over-head camshaft engine design is based off of the highly competent and lightweight Daimler aero unit of that period. Recently awarded the Most Historically Significant Mercedes-Benz by the Mercedes-Benz Club of America, the Revs Institute’s Grand Prix car will be returning to Lyon, France for the centenary anniversary of that historic race this April.

1939 Mercedes-Benz W154: The very last Grand Prix car to be completed and raced by the legendary Daimler-Benz Rennabteilung before the war, and during the road racing era called the “Age of Titans” encompassing the 1934-1939 time period during which the German state-supported Grand Prix teams of Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union achieved total domination. The W154 with its sleek and highly sophisticated two-stage supercharged V-12 engine burns nearly one gallon per minute of highly volatile methanol based fuel, while creating almost 500 horsepower from its 3 liter design. These cars were considered to be of the most highly sophisticated of all racing cars of their day, and beyond. In an ear-splitting momentous event in historic motor sports, the Collier Collections’ W154 ran alongside other rare examples of these amazing titans of racing machinery in the Silver Arrow display feature at the 2012 Goodwood Revival.

1953 Porsche 550 Coupe: Marking the time when Porsche themselves designed a prototype car specifically for racing, the 1498cc production car engine was “improved” for higher power and fitted with Solex twin-choke carburetors. Despite a rainy track day in 1953 without its hardtop, at its initial race at the Nürburgring amidst stiff competition, as well as carburetion problems – it won! By Season’s end, these cars were on their way to Guatemala and a group of Porsche enthusiasts headed by Jaroslav Juhan who raced them in the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico (550-02 took its class) and the 1000-Kilometer Race in Buenos Aires (550-01 this car won) as well as at Sebring, among other races. “These incredible Porsches,” Autosport said. “Potent Porsches” headlined Autocar. The 550 had shown three continents that Porsche was serious about racing.

1958 Scarab Sports-Racer: The Scarab with its dependable and powerful small-block Chevrolet V-8 engine, was a car of front-engine design that proved very successful and dominated United States racing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when other teams were changing to the mid-engine layout. The brainchild of Lance Reventlow, whose father was a European count, mother the Woolworth heiress, and whose wife at time was actress Jill St. John, only eight Scarab racers of various form were ever built. The Revs Institute’s 1958 Scarab Sport-Racer, was recently honored with the Best in Show Award in the Sport Class at the 19th annual Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance.

1963 Corvette Grand Sport: The Revs Institute’s historically significant 1963 Corvette Grand Sport, number four of only five made, represents Chevrolet’s ever-so-brief foray into competitive championship racing in the early 1960′s and their answer to Carroll Shelby’s Cobra. G.M. decided not to lift its ban on racing at the end of 1962, and the ax fell abruptly on their efforts, with only five cars existing at Chevrolet’s Research Center in 1963. The Grand Sport uses a highly modified 377 cubic-inch, all-aluminum form of the small-block Chevrolet V-8. The display car received the coveted John Fitch Corvette Excellence Award at the 2013 Monterey Motorsports Reunion and ran for three checkered flags on the track.

1971 Porsche 917K: This 917 is one of the 25 917′s built by Porsche in the spring of 1969 in order to qualify the 12-cyl. coupe as a member of the five-liter Group 5 class. This Porsche gallery car was part of Porsche Salzburg Racing team in 1970 and in 1971 raced as a member of the Martini Racing Team, the new name Louise Piëch gave her organization following sponsorship from Martini & Rossi, and was part of the team that took Le Mans in 1970. The psychedelic colors remain, as do the pockmarks on the front nose in its original condition. This Martini 917K shows the current stewardship movement in motorcar preservation, to not over-restore or otherwise misrepresent historically significant automobiles. For a couple of brief years, the Porsche 917 dominated the world stage of sports car racing and is still considered legendary to those who know of its successes.

These six cars are but a small fraction of the museum’s holdings, which include more than 100 automobiles grouped into four collections, including Automobility (the story of the automobile’s impact on modern life), Vitesse: Sports Motoring and Motoring Sports (the story of the high-performance automobile’s evolution), Porsche: Designed to Excel (the story of Porsche’s engineering evolution) and Revs: Racing Cars and Racing Men (the story of the racing car’s evolution). Public visits can be scheduled on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., and four docent-led tours (not two, as previously reported) will be conducted each day, at 10:00, 10:30, 1:00 and 1:30.

To book a visit, or for additional information on access, pricing or group tours, visit RevsInstitute.org.

The trick to placing well at concours d’elegance events is standing out in the crowd, and in the world of European collector cars, few are as hard to ignore as the 1937 Horch 853 Voll & Ruhrbeck Sport Cabriolet owned by Robert M. Lee of Sparks, Nevada. On Sunday, his stunning silver convertible captured Best in Show Concours d’Elegance honors at Amelia Island, adding to a trophy case that also includes a Best of Show at Pebble Beach in 2009.

Though the Horch 853 is a German car, the flowing lines of its Voll & Ruhrbeck coach-built body give the car an almost French feel, and clearly date it within the art deco era. Long and low, with copious amounts of chrome and gleaming silver paint, the Horch also featured such innovations as an independent suspension, and an inline eight-cylinder engine that produced an estimated 120 horsepower. It’s said that the rear-mounted spare tires seen on the Horch inspired Henry Ford to develop a similar mount for the 1939 Lincoln Continental.

The early history of this example, chassis 853558, is largely unknown, as the Voll & Ruhrbeck factory was destroyed during World War II. The car surfaced in Switzerland after the war and eventually made it to the United States. Under the ownership of Dr. Herbert Boyer, the Horch was first displayed at Pebble Beach in 1988; following a restoration, the car was acquired by Lee in 1997, and it was once again displayed at Pebble Beach in 1999 as part of the Horch Anniversary Class. After conducting extensive (but often fruitless) research on the cabriolet’s history, Lee funded a thorough disassembly and piece-by-piece restoration that reportedly took five years to complete.

Winning Best in Show Concours de Sport at Amelia Island was a 1958 Scarab Mk II, painted in the Meister Brauser I livery first raced by Augie Pabst to a victory at the SCCA Milwaukee Regional in August of 1959. Chassis 003 (which wore various meatballs throughout its career, including the number 50 seen here) proved to be good luck for Pabst, carrying him to the United States Auto Club’s National Road Racing Championship in 1959. As if that wasn’t enough of an accomplishment for Pabst and the Scarab Mk II, the car also carried him to a national championship in the SCCA’s B-Modified class in the same year.

Only three road-racing Scarabs were ever built. The first was dubbed the Mk I, while the two that followed were both considered Mk II variants. Both Mk II Scarabs were right-hand drive, which put the driver on the inside of corners (aiding weight distribution) on tracks run clockwise. Both used space frame construction, and both were considerably wider than the original Mk I Scarab. Power for the Mk II’s came from a small-block Chevrolet V-8, while the Ford parts bin provided front spindles and brakes used in conjunction with custom-cast finned aluminum brake drums.

Owned by the Collier Collection in Naples, Florida, chassis 003 is also a frequent participant in vintage and historic motorsports events around the country. Recently restored, the car wears an identical livery to its 1960 Watkins Glen appearance.

In 1962, the industrial building at 1042 Princeton Drive in Venice, California (now Marina del Rey) housed the offices and production facilities of start-up automaker Shelby American. The one-time production facility for the Shelby Cobra is now home to an internet retailer, an architectural firm and a movie production company, with no evidence of the site’s former role in racing history. Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the building’s owner flipped the property as part of a multi-building deal, selling a total of three Princeton Drive properties for $10.7 million.

Just as Carroll Shelby was ramping up production of the Shelby Cobra, Lance Reventlow was closing down Reventlow Automobiles, Incorporated (RAI), the builder of the legendary Scarab sports racer. A deal between Reventlow and Shelby was inked, and Shelby took possession of RAI’s former manufacturing facility at 1042 Princeton Drive in Venice, California. In the process, Shelby also hired master fabricator Phil Remington from RAI and acquired a 1956 Fiat Series 306/2 Grand Prix transporter, which would be used to haul Shelby’s Cobra Daytona coupes across Europe (and would make several appearances in the film classic Le Mans).

Shelby leased the property at 1042 Princeton Drive from 1962 to 1967, before relocating to Ionia, Michigan. It was during Shelby’s time in Venice that the company captured the 1965 World Sportscar Championship, beating Ferrari in the process and becoming the first American constructor to do so. Today, Shelby American builds continuation Cobras and enhanced Ford Mustangs from its facility in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The parcel of buildings in Marina del Rey, which also included properties at 1038 and 1040 Princeton Drive, sold in early 2012 to an unnamed limited liability company for the sum of $6.7 million. While the former Shelby American headquarters at 1042 Princeton is fully occupied, the rest of the buildings sold in the bundle are reportedly vacant but have been remodeled for use as office space.

For the sake of brevity, we’ve actually left quite a bit of significant history out of the headline for this story on the 1956 Fiat Series 306/2 Grand Prix transporter that RM Auctions has consigned to its Monterey sale later this month. While Carroll Shelby did indeed use it to ferry around his Cobras 50 years ago, the transporter has over its lifespan done the same duties for the Maserati factory team, Lance Reventlow’s Scarabs, Alan Mann’s GT40s, and the Lotus factory team and starred in Steve McQueen’s Le Mans. Try to fit all that into one headline.

Originally built by Fiat’s Fiat Veicoli Industriali subsidiary, which focused on building truck and bus chassis, Maserati bought the flat-12 diesel-powered Series 306/2 Alpine bus chassis in 1956 and commissioned the special body – which included space for three cars along with a workshop and storage compartments to suitably support a race team’s efforts – from Bartoletti in Forti, Italy, the same coachbuilder that later built similar Fiat-based transporters for Ferrari. Maserati used it to haul its Formula One cars over the next couple of seasons, but after its withdrawal from Formula One racing in 1957, Maserati sold the transporter to Lance Reventlow, at that time putting together Reventlow Automobiles Inc. and building the first of his Scarabs.

Reventlow, like Briggs Cunningham, found that he couldn’t easily continue spending money on an unprofitable racing concern for more than five years, so he folded RAI in 1962, just as Carroll Shelby was looking for a base of operations for his new Cobra venture. Along with Reventlow’s shop in Los Angeles, Shelby also picked up from Reventlow the services of Phil Remington and the Bartoletti transporter. According to RM, it was Shelby who decided to add a third axle to the transporter to handle the extra weight of his Cobra Daytona coupes as he raced them throughout Europe.

After Shelby, it passed through the hands of Lotus and Mann before English privateer David Piper bought it and rented it to Steve McQueen’s Solar Productions for use in Le Mans, where the transporter reportedly filled multiple roles: Solar used it as the transporter for the Ferrari, Porsche, and Renault/Mirage teams, repainting it in the appropriate team color scheme for each camera appearance. Still wearing its Ferrari color scheme, it then went to Ferrari 250 GTO collector Sir Anthony Bamford, who later sold it to Michael Schoen. Schoen reportedly planned a restoration, but the transporter then sat in the Arizona desert for nearly 20 years, caught in the middle of a Schoen family dispute that also included control of U-Haul.

It wasn’t until 2006 that the current owner, a prominent Scarab collector and vintage racer, bought the transporter and commissioned a complete two-year body-off restoration, deciding to retain the 11.5-liter Leyland six-cylinder turbodiesel that had earlier replaced the flat-12. It debuted to wide acclaim at the 2008 Monterey Historics, with three Scarabs once again upon its back and original RAI equipment still with it.

RM’s pre-auction estimate for the transporter ranges from $850,000 to $1.1 million. For comparison’s sake, Gooding sold another Bartoletti transporter, a 1959 Fiat Tipo 682/RN-2 built for Ferrari, for $990,000 at its Pebble Beach auction last year, as well as a “barn-find” 1966 Fiat Tipo 643/N-1, coachbuilt by Rolfo for Ferrari, for $297,000 at its 2007 Pebble Beach auction. Given that this transporter has ties to Reventlow, Shelby, Mann, Juan Manuel Fangio, and Steve McQueen’s Le Mans (a watch McQueen wore for the movie – a watch! – recently sold for $800,000), it’s a good bet RM’s pre-auction estimate runs on the conservative side.

RM’s Monterey auction will take place August 17-18 at the Portola Hotel and Spa and Monterey Conference Center. For more information, visit RMAuctions.com.

UPDATE (9.November 2012): The final selling price for the transporter was $990,000.

A special three-day SCARAB 50th Anniversary celebration is planned for the
2008 Kohler International Challenge Vintage Races weekend July 17-20 at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.

This will include a Gala SCARAB 50th Anniversary dinner on Saturday, July 19, at the Osthoff Resort in Elkhart Lake, as well as special SCARAB
on-track celebrations on Saturday and Sunday and a special SCARAB hospitality
and exhibition tent for the SCARABS, their crews and the various people whose
lives have been touched by these wonderful race cars.

Attending this event will be many of the people who were involved in the design and
development of the Reventlow SCARABS in 1957–1960, or who were a part of the
Reventlow, Nickey Chevrolet, Meister Brauser, or Mecom racing teams or who now
own or have owned or driven one of these wonderful SCARABS.

For more information, call 248-650-9542.

(This post originally appeared in the June 5, 2008, issue of the Hemmings eWeekly Newsletter.)